Efficient problem diagnosis for network infrastructure has grown in importance as network services have become more ubiquitous. Such network services can include cable service. Currently, the most popular cable architecture is a hybrid fiber coax (HFC) architecture. An HFC architecture can employ fiber optic cable for the long distance from a hub (or headend) site to a node. A hub site (or headend) is a source point for downstream signals and a destination point for upstream signals. A fiber node can include a grouping of approximately 500 homes passed. Inside a node the signals are distributed via coaxial cable to customer premise equipment (CPE) devices, which are typically located inside a home, apartment, or office. A CPE device can be a cable modem (CM), multimedia terminal adapter (MTA), set-top box (STB), or gateway device. A coaxial portion of the cable plant is built with a tree-and-branch architecture, so an outage on a fiber node branch can potentially affect multiple subscribers in different geographic locations.
Diagnosis of a network problem can be performed using software that communicates with the CPE devices. Cable service assurance involves the identification and subsequent troubleshooting of problems in an HFC network. A problem can originate from a CPE device, a fiber node, or a cable modem termination system (CMTS). A fiber node can connect the CMTS to CPE devices. An important diagnosis is identifying the particular fiber node that is associated with a CPE device experiencing an outage. Several inputs to and outputs from multiple fiber nodes can be summed together to provide connectivity to a single CMTS at a hub site. As a consequence, there is no obvious and reliable method to identify the connectivity of a fiber node with a CPE device. Typically, the billing data of a CPE device can be used to identify the fiber node information. However, the billing data can often become out-of-date and costly to update regularly.
Like reference numbers and designations in the various drawings indicate like elements.